I've not played any FATE games yet, but I do own a few FATE powered games including Diaspora and Starblaser Adventures. I treat them much in the same way I used to buy GURPS supplements just for the ideas back in the day.

However I backed the FATE Kickstarter to the tune of $10 for everything as PDFs. For that minor investment it looks like thanks to the many unlocked stretch goals I'm going to get about a Bajillion pages of rules supplements, settings, adventures and fiction.

The Fate Core rules, along with a lite version called Fate Accelerated Edition just dropped and I've been reading them through. So far I like what I see. They still contain a lot of jargon (Aspects, Shifts, Compels, etc) but even the core version seems a lot more streamlined than previous iterations of the rules. The real gem may be FAE though.

I'm reading Core first as paradoxically it's longer examples and explanations of terms is easier for me to understand. I think I like this game a lot. It combines just enough game mechanical crunch for my tastes, but stays very flexible.

I'm thinking of using it as the engine for an SF campaign I'm working on called Horizon which I was goign to run using Apocalypse World. Has anyone else here any experience using FATE for SF gaming?

I also backed this one, going for the hardcopy of the corebook (probably plus all the PDFs, which I don't really care much about). I've tried to figure out FATE but it hasn't clicked with me, this is basically the last chance I'm giving it to click.

My experience with FATE was to play a whole bunch of different game genres (pirates, Diaspora, swashbuckling space opera) with the same GM, and utterly hate the system in all of them.

Then I played it with a different GM, and it changed from a system that got in the way of the game to a system that was actualy quite fun. I'm not likely to swap to running it myself, but I can now see why people like it.

My experience with FATE was to play a whole bunch of different game genres (pirates, Diaspora, swashbuckling space opera) with the same GM, and utterly hate the system in all of them.

Then I played it with a different GM, and it changed from a system that got in the way of the game to a system that was actualy quite fun. I'm not likely to swap to running it myself, but I can now see why people like it.

Since I may be running a FATE game soon, I'd love some tips on how to be more like the second GM and less like the first.

Be flexible and fun! Let the players and GM invent aspects at the planning stage of a mission. We were on a secret mission to a Maharajah's palace and while brainstorming our plan we came up with Aspects of 'Monsoon Season', 'Old Codgers' (ex army veterans colony nearby), and all sorts of other stuff that were of benefit to us or of benefit to the opposition.

Make Aspects matter. One of the low points of the first GM's Diaspora game was spending THREE aspects whilst trying to get info out of the Bad Guy and learning precisely nothing.

Make failure interesting. The second GM seemed to be using the FATE rules in a way that even if we failed rolls, we still achieved stuff. So we've found the map we wanted, but the guards are onto us.

Don't make the dice roll difficulties too high. That is a bad habit of the first GM in many systems (Dr Who, Leverage and Fate). In Fate it was particularly noticeable, as the dice will give you a negative result as often as they give you a positive one.

EDITED TO ADD: Oh yes, and make combat/initiative order have some sort of common sense. My character's declaration of "Oh, frak it! I knee him in the balls!" should have my character acting FIRST, even if I then miss or the victim then dodges. The first GM's interpretation of the initiative rules were:

1) I declare I'm kneeing Tom in the balls.2) Dick hits Harry, because, y'know, Dick has the highest initiative.3) Tom hits me.4) Harry hits Dick.5) Finally, I get to try and do the kneeing which everyone else apparently used psychic powers to anticipate!

Pardon my observation, but it seems more of an issue that the first GM is the type I'd simply call "bad" and sort of has the anti-Midas touch: Any game system that GM touches would probably would be bad.

As for my own experience with FATE, I find that FATE is part of a general trend in gaming away from "simulationist" gaming and more towards a "storytelling" mode. The general theme of this generation is that the rules of a game should be there to enable you to do "heroic" or "fantastic" actions and moderate them, instead of assigning discouraging obstacles for any action that isn't "sensible" (Player: "I want to run across the spar and leap onto a rope and swing across to the other ship like Erol Flynn!" GM: "According to the skill rules of action stacking, that's an Impossible task, no that's a Beyond Impossible task." ... later: GM: "I don't like how players approach the game like it's a house-clearing operation in low-intensity urban warfare." Players: "...").

If you enjoy your games crunchy with simulation treatment of situations, this generation of games (including FATE) aren't for you. That's not a bad thing, myself I enjoy quite a bit of crunch at times. But I do find this makes FATE less suited to a lot of "traditional" RPG genres where we expect a certain amount of wargaming crunch - as a result, most of the more popular FATE titles occur in less-traditional RPG settings where players don't have preconceptions about how much crunch there should be.

However, there's something that jarringly pulls you out of the story in my experience. The economy of spending FATE points is pretty cool, however as a word of warning to GMs and players, the point-spending can get out of control really fast if everyone doesn't come up with some sort of "gentleman's agreement" to make things move away from an arms race of who is willing to spend more points to win (though I know a number of people for whom that's the fun of the game).

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